Factory floor operations during the manufacturing, maintenance, or upgrading of large, complex machines, such as but not limited to aircraft, often involve simultaneous and/or sequential multiple activities to be performed by multiple crews. One example of such factory floor operations is the flight deck operations during the manufacturing, maintenance, or upgrading of an aircraft. Each crew working on that aircraft may operate more efficiently if it has certain resources in order to perform its assigned job. A problem occurs when two different crews request that the same resource be configured differently for their respective jobs. For example, one crew may want the primary flight control system disabled so that backup flight control system can be tested and evaluated, while at the same time another crew may want the primary flight control system enabled so that a newly installed or replaced component on that primary system can be tested and evaluated. The Flight Deck Operator (FDO) is responsible for allocating and controlling the resources, and resolving conflicts over a resource. For example, the FDO would be responsible for enabling or disabling the primary flight control system based on the priority of the conflicting jobs, and would also be responsible for knowing the status of the various resources. The FDO therefore is responsible to know the current state of each resource and why (for what job) it is in that state.
If there are numerous requests for resources the FDO may become overwhelmed and forget the status of one or more resources. Also, the FDO may receive insufficient, incorrect, or untimely information as to the status of one or more resources. Further, when shifts change, it is almost impossible for an outgoing FDO to remember and then verbally, accurately, and completely communicate the status of the various jobs and resources to an incoming FDO who is responsible to accurately hear, understand, and then remember the status of each resource. Therefore, it is not unusual, when a shift change occurs, for the next crew to restart a test from the beginning, or spend time trying to determine the state of a job and the status of the resources when a previous team left. This increases the time and cost of servicing the aircraft. In addition, when a problem occurs, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to identify the status of the various related resources leading up to the time when the problem occurred so that procedures can be implemented to prevent that problem from occurring again.